A Child's Wings
by Eternalis
Summary: Not directly related to A Child Called It, but heavily based on it. Maya is a severely disabled child whose mother pretended she died when she was two. However, the day her mother must notice her again, Maya's life takes a drastic turn for the worse.


Chapter One

The water is gray today. Gray like my days, gray like my mind, gray like the rocks that I crouch on, gray like my mother's eyes. I sit in the cold, arms wrapped around my body, rocking. If I keep moving I'll stay alive. The minute I stop moving, I'll freeze, and they'll throw me into the gray dirty sea. But I am so tired, my body aches with bone weakness and I feel like I could shatter here on the rocks and simply slide into the ocean.

The water was blue once, blue like my father's eyes, blue like the memory of the sky. I haven't seen the sky in a long time, too long to count. Maybe it was only a dream.

I know somehow that I am different. I have not seen another child since I was tiny, except for my sister, but my memories go back to days after I was born. My memory is perfect, and I can't escape it. It's part of the reason I'm here. Part of the reason why I died.

But I didn't die.

I remember, dimly, a hospital room, a crying woman that I must assume was my mother. She stands over me, come to take me back home, and her face is stained with tears, but her eyes are hateful, cold and gray and hard as ice. I know dimly that something is wrong, but I cannot place it. I can make no sound, but there is sound around me, everywhere there are people making noise.

And then I am home, tucked away in a box, and they are screaming. This is how my first memories are, of people screaming, of my mother crying, of bitterness that twists my stomach into terrible knots.

My sister is crawling toward my box, inching her way across the floor. She pulls herself up and walks toward me when she knows the coast is clear, moving toward where I lie under the window. I am so weak, my limbs so heavy that I can barely move. I turn my head slowly to see her face. I remember thinking that she is beautiful, like her dolls, with clear sapphire eyes and golden skin and thick black hair.

She bends toward me and reaches into the box. Her hand finds my face, pets my hair, and then it happens. It might have been the first time it happened. She is close to me, closer than skin, and inside she is frightened, more frightened than I am. She understands less than I do. She is so small and fragile.

She says a word, my name. "Maya." Hope.

For a minute I think the pain is my own, my heart twisting into knots. Tears spill over silently, and then she is crying too, and I know it is her I feel.

She tells me that I am almost three. She expands the words I am beginning to learn (no one has ever taught me) but I pick them up faster. She is six, and she is left behind. She brings me her books, shows me the letters and what they mean. I soak up the knowledge like a sponge.

I struggle with the pages. My hands are clumsy, and sometimes won't respond at all. My arms are weak, and I can't hold her books. I try to stand, but I fall and can't move. I do not speak loudly; using my voice takes a lot of effort, which I need for what movement I can manage.

I move from the box to a cot in the basement when I turn three. My sister feeds me, because no one will touch me. My mother acts like I do not exist. It feels like I do not exist, like I am a ghost. I am so lonely, I would find more company in death than in life. No one knows I am there. My mother never sees me. My father is always gone. It is like not existing but being alive.

My sister tips the remainder of her soup into my mouth, or brings me milk or yogurt or pudding-occasionally even ice cream, but it is cold and hurts my teeth, which she helps me brush at night. I can't eat anything solid. Moving hurts, a dull ache in my bones that is as constant as my own breath, and which may probably last longer. It's weakness so complete that it generates its own pain, not just the pain of my condition.

I learn at amazing speeds. My sister brings me more books, and by age five I have progressed past her math books to even higher levels. She is in third grade that year. I remember her eighth birthday. That year she tells me about birthday presents.

I read all the time, because it is all that I can do, lying on my stomach with the book propped against the back of the crib so I can inch the pages aside. And then breathing becomes too hard and my ribs hurt, and I undertake the slow, step by step process of rolling over. I close my aching eyes and rest for a while, but I do not sleep.

Sleep is almost impossible. Sometimes I doze off, but pain always wakes me up. I refuse to cry, but my sister tells me I cry in my sleep.

My legs give out and I slide down the rock, resting my cheek against a smooth patch. Desperately I struggle for my memories, for one of warmth, perhaps even one of happiness. I am so close to the water. I am so close to death. I have been waiting for this day for my entire life, yet now that it is near I hold my life as something precious.

One night it gets cold, so cold that it combines with the pain of my condition and the pain of my weakness and becomes something I can't stand. Lily brings me blankets and climbs on to my cot with me, but she is so careful not to touch me that it makes me feel dirty somehow, and I cry harder.

My sister is the only person that cares for me. She carries me to the downstairs bathroom, which she washes herself since Mother doesn't even acknowledge that there is a basement, let alone that I am in it. She puts me in diapers while she is at school, since I can't stand. This embarrasses me so much that one day I ask her to teach me to walk.

She sits down beside me and says, "I asked Mother what happened to you."

"No!" I exclaim. Once Lily asked before, and Mother hurt her badly, and she couldn't carry me, and her wrist was all at funny angles.

"It was all right. I didn't ask about now, I asked about when you were born."

"What did she say?"

"She said that she had a baby who was so messed up she would never walk and her heart would collapse. She said the baby died."

Is that my condition? I wonder. "She didn't say what it was?"

"No."

"Then teach me to walk."

"You'll never be able to."

"I want to try," I say stubbornly. "You're gone all day. She never comes down."

"She would squish you like a bug!" She lifts my hand carefully. "Look here, feel how different we are."

I touch her hand-solid, slender but strong, and then mine, fragile, the bones too thin, with no muscles.

"Your whole body is like that."

"I can be careful," I insist.

"It'll just get worse," she insists. "That's what she said would have happened. Eventually you wouldn't feel a thing and your bones would turn to mush."

Fear squeezes knots in my belly. "She may have been lying. She hated me. That's why I'm dead to her." I begin to cry, big racking sobs that make my body ache with bone weakness.

Lily reaches down and hugs me gently, and her fear mixes with mine and I cry harder.

"Don't cry, Maya," she says desperately. "Please don't cry, I can't see you cry."

I sternly command myself to stop crying. Lily sinks away from me, looking calmer than before. I breathe through the pain in my ribs that crying has caused, and when I can speak again I ask her. "You do it all the time," I say. "You do it in your sleep. How hard can it be if you do it in your sleep?"

"I do not sleepwalk!" she insists, and we both laugh.

She comes back to me one day after I have turned seven and says she might have an idea. "You have to try," she says. "It won't be walking, not yet. But I go in at lunch and see Miss Feather, and she has a girl like you, and she tells me that Anna can stand still, sometimes."

"What is she like?"

"Quiet," she says, "all the time. She fell once and cried, but she was silent. And she has no lessons; she sits in Miss Feather's room all day, and usually cries. Miss Feather says that it's because she hurts all the time and they can't help her."

I think about Anna who cries with silence and doesn't learn, and my heart twists painfully. I am so happy to have Lily, who tries. But Anna has everyone, and no one tries. It's not fair.

The day comes when Lily says she cannot take books downstairs anymore. "I'll do it when I come in," she promises. "I'll come in through the garage, and pick them up in the mornings when I get my bike."

She is ten now, but I am doing sixth-grade work. I am reading at a ninth-grade level. I am only seven. Lily tells me that I am unusual, but it's a good kind of unusual.

"Why not?" I ask.

"She says I'll get them dirty. I don't need such big advanced books anyway."

I fume silently. Mother is finally taking action in my life, but she must keep her fiction in place. "She knows I'm here."

"Of course she does. She can't make you not exist."

I lift a hand toward her. It hurts my bones, but it has become easier. "Show me how to walk now. I _do_ exist."

"You can't yet," she says.

"Why not?"

"Because you've only been moving around for a little while."

I don't have the time for this, I think. Any day now, the paralysis could set in, or my bones will become too soft, or my muscles will break down to the point where I will never have my chance to step outside and see the sun ...

The _sun_ ...

I am going to cry, but I command myself not to. "You don't understand," I murmur.

She bends toward me. "There's someone like you. Someone who doesn't have to cry with silence and not learn like Anna. Someone who sees the world, who sees beyond it, who sees the universe-you would understand, I couldn't."

My eyes fly open and for a moment I forget everything, even the bone weakness eating away at my body. "What? Really? Who?"

"I don't know!" she says, looking contrite. "I kinda wasn't paying attention until they said he was like you. Kinda ish. But he doesn't talk, like you can. I don't know if that means he's really like you, or just similar."

Determinedly, I drag myself to the edge of the cot, trying to avoid pressing on the soft places in my hands and arms.

"Let me up," I say urgently. "Take me outside, Lily, please, just this once ..." I hate to beg her, but I have to, I want to know that I don't live in a box. It's as if, by seeing the sky again, by knowing I didn't dream it up, it will affirm that this miraculous man really exists.

Lily looks torn, her huge dark eyes filling with tears. "But Mother will hurt you if she sees you."

"I don't care," I say harshly, and I know I am barely understandable, but I don't care about that either. "She can't hurt me more than I already have been." My voice breaks and trails away, and my face falls on to my arms.

Something in my face must sway Lily, because she comes over to the bed and helps me sit up. She lifts me, slowly, to my feet, and I collapse against her. She turns me around so that my back is pressed against her. I am so light that she can hold me up, weak with malnutrition and a heart that is pumping itself to death and muscles that are melting and bones that are collapsing under their own weight.

Lily steps forward, slowly, and every muscle in my body screams in protest. My world explodes into shimmering sparks, and for a moment, I am convinced that I will simply fall out of my body and into the sky. I gasp with alternating hot and cold and the unnerving sensation that every direction has suddenly reversed itself.

"Maya!" Lily cries. She turns to lift me back on to the bed, but I say through numb lips, "Keep going."

She takes a step, and the pain is so intense it has gone from fire to ice, and I know that my body will not let me feel it anymore. I tell her to keep going, my voice steadier now, but I know this is a bad thing, because I know my own body. Lily does not, and she thinks I am better. Poor Lily, she knows nothing of what goes on inside of me, and I know barely more than that.

Step by agonized step, we make our way to the door. It is not far, but it feels like thousands of miles between here and there, an impassible, dangerous distance. A strange coldness creeps steadily through my limbs, and I know something is terribly wrong, but I must be sure, I must know for certain. I cannot bear to live in ignorance for the rest of my life. I cannot stand to live uncertain of my own existence.

Lily reaches the door, and I think I will be all right, I can keep my eyes open long enough to see whatever lies on the other side. She moves forward to open it, but the motion she makes, turning in ways that are natural to her but have long since become impossible for me, breaks the coldness in my bones. A flood of fire breaks through my body and I want to scream, but my voice breaks.

Before Lily can catch me, I fall forward, rock on hands and knees for a moment and collapse, gasping, as grey closes over my vision. I can't battle the icy darkness grasping at the edges of my sight, and I think that I may never se the other side of that door, that I am going to die here in the entrance, that we all live with our dreams slightly out of reach, with some taunting invisible barrier blocking us from ever really reaching them.

"No!" Lily's tears are hot against my skin. "I shouldn't have moved you! Oh, what do I do?"

I gather effort slowly and channel it, forcing it out through my voice. "Keep. Moving."

"No, I'll put you back."

"No," I whisper. "No." I can't move. My own will is not enough to make it happen. But Lily lifts me easily, and I swear I can hear my bones creaking. My vision swims with gray, but I force my eyes open. I have to know. Something burns in me that I'm not familiar with, and in a way, it frightens me.

The door is open, but I can see nothing beyond the awning, nothing but a strange, pale light ...

And then Lily carefully leads me into the day.

I must have made a sound, because Lily's hand came up to shade my eyes. It is so bright, dazzling and painful, that for a moment all I can see is swimming brilliance. Slowly, not believing what I am seeing, I look up ... and up ... and up ...

The sky is the clearest blue I have ever seen, the kind of blue I can fall into. There is no roof above my head, there is only that limitless nothing spangled with strange, half-known things, so blue that the color drowns anything within it.

My eyes follow all that deep blue until it mingles with pale gold, until that gold intensifies into a brilliant flare of timeless light which I cannot directly look at. I feel tears slide down my face. The air smells so ... so clear, so clean. It doesn't smell like mildew and mice and me. It smells like the sun, a hot, dry, clean smell.

"Now do you believe me?" Lily asks, quietly.

"Is it real?" I ask.

"It's real," she whispers into my hair.

I start to sag in her arms and she sits against the wall with me on her lap.

"Is he real?" I murmur. Maybe it was just a sound I made, but I know it was the question in my mind.

"I wouldn't lie to you," she says, "not ever, Maya, I promise."

I think of the man who lives like me and speaks in silence and sees the universe, and tears slide from my eyes, but I can't wipe them away. They collect on my chin and fall, and Lily wipes my face with her sleeve, because it is all she has.

"Lily!"

Even after all this time, I know that voice. I hear it from upstairs sometimes.

"Oh no," Lily says. "Oh no, oh no." Desperately she climbs to her feet, pulling me with her. "I'm sorry if I hurt you. I don't want you to die."

I'm going to die anyway, I think, whether my heart pumps itself out or my bones crush it first.

I can hear her coming now, and I make a valiant effort to help Lily, but even if I had been taken care of it would be hard to move. As it was, it was nearly impossible.

"What are you doing back here, Lily?"

"No!" Lily says. Disregarding everything, she bundles me into her arms and runs for the door. But I am not entirely light, and I do unbalance her.

Something impacts Lily's back and she stumbles and falls. I hit the dirt first, and the pain is so intense that for a moment it knocks me out, and my senses swim away into blessed numbness.

When I finally struggle to my senses, there is a woman shaking Lily, yelling at her. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" she screams. "Imagine what your grandmother would think, knowing that her daughter can only make imperfect scum!"

Tears flow down Lily's face, but she refuses to make a sound. I am so proud of her, but at the same time I am miserable, knowing that all of her problems are because of me, the girl who does not exist.

"Look at what I've spawned! You, mental and retarded, and that ..." Her voice trails off as she looks down at me. I don't even have the time to be angry with her, because the look in her eyes is so terrible that it's mind-numbing. I have never since seen such contempt etched on any face for any creature in any state of being that lives on or below the earth. I have never seen such utter scorn and disgust. It's the way you'd look at shell-less, grotesque cockroaches mutated by nuclear fallout. The look in her eyes is simply so evil that my mind freezes, that my world focuses on her eyes, that I can think of nothing else.

I would later come to understand that I am everything Mother hates about herself. She was raised to believe that she could never achieve, that she was no better than the filth on her father's boots. She was her mother's bane and the disgrace of her family because she was born of wedlock and forced two people to marry who ended up despising each other more than anything except their own daughter, because Mother's family was old-fashioned, and if you got pregnant you had to marry the father. I am, to her, the symbol of her every failure in her family's eyes. As long as she knows I live, she can only go slowly insane with self-loathing, because she is such a weak, broken person, her soul twisted and stunted by her every influence.

She reaches down and pulls me roughly up, shoving me ahead of her into the house. I must have blacked out with pain again, because the next sound I can hear is water running. My face is pressed to a tile floor, but it is clean, so I know that I am upstairs. The coldness is creeping back through my bones and this time I welcome it, anything to keep my mind clear for the moment. Lily has such responsibility, I think, taking care of her defective sister. A sick feeling of helplessness twists inside me until my stomach is tied into knots of guilt and sadness, and I can only wait for whatever Mother has planned for me and know that she can hurt me no more than I already have been. There is nothing in the world that could hurt me more.

It would become my only consolation.


End file.
